This Week in Fiction: Colin Barrett

Your story in this week’s issue, “The Ways,” follows three siblings—Pell, a sixteen-year-old girl; her older brother, Nick; and her younger brother, Gerry—over the course of a day. The perspective shifts from one sibling to another as the day progresses. Did you always have this time frame and structure in mind for the story?

The notion of the perspective switching came pretty soon into writing the first part—Pell’s part—of the story, once it became apparent to me how intertwined the lives of her and her brothers had become in the wake of their bereavement.

In terms of character, the shifts were a way of keeping the story animated and interesting without compromising the dynamic of impregnable inarticulacy that exists between the three Munnelly kids. It does not mean that they don’t love each other, but they don’t talk, other than to harangue and gibe.

Formally, the perspectival shifts introduced a structural and therefore narrative discipline. There’s potentially a lot going on in this story—three main characters, a deep backstory if I’d chosen to get into it. Switching perspectives kept things focussed. A tight timespan is usually a great thing to work with, too, as it’s another method of imposing discipline. You have to shoot down any grandiose notions of arcs and journeys and just get to the core of the thing.

Pell, Nick, and Gerry have been fending for themselves for the past couple of years, since first their mother and then their father died. The story touches only glancingly on what their lives were like when the family was still intact. How deliberate a decision was this?

It was very important. I was fundamentally only interested in effects, not cause. Earlier versions of the story contained almost no mention of what had actually happened to the parents. My original conception was that the three kids had effectively sunk into a collective state of repression so deep-set that it was as if the parents had never existed at all. That conceit didn’t quite work—to early readers, it made a mystery out of what was not meant to be a mystery—but I still wanted to be parsimonious when it came to that aspect of the story, the parents’ deaths. The kids deal with their folks’ death by largely not thinking about it. The not-thinking-about-it is an act of pathetically inadequate reciprocation: to a kid (to any of us), no matter how illogical, death can feel like an insult, a vicious snub. Your parents are there for what seems like forever, then they go. Why wouldn’t you get angry?

Each of the siblings appears to retreat into a private world at times, one which it’s hard for the others to have access to—Nick works constantly, for example, while Gerry holes up in his room to play video games. How challenging was it to capture these differing experiences of isolation?

It probably says much about me that capturing such isolation was not that difficult! The Munnellys’ situation is extreme, but, having grown up in a house with siblings, that individual compulsion for space, for territorial autonomy, both emotionally and physically, is something I can identify with. Private worlds are necessary in any social unit, and the Munnellys are lucky in a way. They stick together. Their respective needs for space are symptoms of the fact that they are going to stick it out together, and that can be especially grueling when you are mirrors of each other’s grief.

You grew up in the west of Ireland, and the language in your fiction seems suffused by the vernacular of that part of the country. How important is it to your work?

“Voice” writing is all there is, to my mind. Taking “standardized” language and deforming it, beautifully. Certainly, with fiction, you have to be trying to do that at some level—your story or novel can be about anything, but one of its subjects has to be the operations and consequences of its own language, or it’s nothing.

Your first collection of stories, “Young Skins,” has already been published in Ireland and the U.K., and it’s coming out in the U.S. this March. Many of those stories are set in a fictional town, Glanbeigh, on the Atlantic coast. Did you map out Glanbeigh in your head as you were working on the stories? Did any of the scenarios in these stories ever take you completely by surprise?

Geographically, Glanbeigh is a slapdash mess—I’ve little doubt that if someone were to attempt to draw a map of the place going on “Young Skins,” it would be completely incoherent. The river, the locations of the streets and buildings, et cetera, changed to suit each story. But no one ever complains or notices (yet), because everything is precisely where it needs to be for each story. We don’t live in the world. We live in our head’s version of the world, and however fascinating and rich with resonances that place can be, it’s also a place rife with lacunae and inconsistencies.

What took me by surprise about the collection as I was writing it, and this goes back almost to your first question, about perspectives and timespans, was how a potential constraint—in the case of “Young Skins,” setting it all in the one place—was actually liberating. It was inspiring, and permitted me to come up with more and more material. I was worried that it might be limiting—that by sticking to one town I’d run out of things to say. Thankfully, the opposite ended up being true.